Feedback deadline is: November 23, 2025
Summary
The College is seeking input from registrants, members of the public and system partners about proposed updates to the mandatory Assurance and Improvement in Medication Safety (AIMS) Program, as outlined in the draft supplemental Standard of Practice, during a 60-day open consultation.
The proposed updates address alignment with the national standards and changes to program requirements, as well as some minor language revisions that do not change the intent of the program or introduce new requirements.
Overview of Changes
The AIMS Program was formally launched in 2019 to strengthen medication safety and quality improvement practices in Ontario’s community pharmacies.
In 2024, the College conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the AIMS Program and identified opportunities to enhance the program’s overall effectiveness and better align with other provinces.
In June 2025, the Board of Directors confirmed that community pharmacies would select their own medication incident reporting platform that complies with criteria outlined by the College and supports data contribution to ISMP’s National Incident Data Repository (NIDR). Community pharmacies would be responsible for platform costs, while the College would cover costs for submitting data to the NIDR.
Proposed Changes
At the September 2025 Board meeting, the Board approved the following changes to the program, subject to public consultation:
- The College will update the requirements outlined in the supplemental Standard of Practice to mandate the following:
- All registered pharmacy staff will have unique logins for the medication incident reporting platform at their primary place of practice
- A safety self-assessment (SSA) be completed at least once every two years
- Continuous quality improvement (CQI) meetings be held at least once every quarter.
- The College will adapt the NAPRA Model Standards of Practice for Continuous Quality Improvement and Medication Incident Reporting by Pharmacy Professionals, based on the updated requirements listed above.
Other changes have been made to improve the clarity of the supplemental standard, in alignment with the College’s second strategic goal on effective communication and the organization’s commitment to transparency and clear, action-oriented language.
Note that the College’s expectations regarding medication incident reporting remain unchanged.
How You Can Participate
The College is inviting all pharmacy professionals, system partners, and members of the public to consider the proposed changes noted above, review the draft updates to the supplemental Standard of Practice, and comment below by November 23, 2025.
When reviewing and commenting on the proposed changes, please consider the following:
- Clarity and Understanding. Are the proposed changes clearly written and easy to understand?
- Alignment with the AIMS Program. Do the proposed changes align with the objectives of the AIMS Program to improve medication safety, promote a safety culture, and support continuous quality improvement?
- Implementation. Do you anticipate any barriers or challenges to implementing the proposed changes?
The feedback we receive is published publicly in accordance with our Posting Guidelines.
Supporting Documents
A summary chart of the proposed changes along with their rationale is available.
You may also refer to a copy of the draft supplemental Standard of Practice.
Please see the briefing note on page 210 of the September 15–16 Board meeting for additional details regarding these changes.
Next Steps
The Board will consider the feedback received and make any revisions to the supplemental standard at the December 2025 meeting. Pharmacy teams will have until January 2027 to implement these changes in full and guidance on managing the transition will be made available.
Updates on implementation of the changes will be provided on the Changes to the Assurance and Improvement in Medication Safety (AIMS) Program webpage.
Read The Feedback
The Pharmapod platform has contributed nothing to medication safety in my pharmacy. It is also cumbersome to use. Time spent answering all those stupid questions that mean nothing to me could be better spent with patients. My previous method of paper reporting and having all members of staff read, discuss with me and sign off on was much more effective of raising on site awareness. Quarterly meetings are a waste of time. Best practice is that every error should be discussed within 7 days with the persons involved and within 30 days with all who need to review. There is benefit to a national platform to collect data. This should be funded by the College as it doesn’t directly impact my pharmacy.
I completely disagree with this strategy. Our pharmacy utilizes our own unique incident reporting system that works for us. It involves the entire team reviewing any incidents or near misses, and openly discussing them with each other. It has nothing to do with a cumbersome and time wasting online reporting system. We’ve been able to successfully implement MANY safety strategies by being open about errors, error prevention and brainstorming solutions. If we relied on online reporting, none of this would have been possible. Online error reporting is a joke – nobody reviews it, and it’s not transparent or easily reviewed by all staff. I find it a complete waste of time in terms of actually making a difference to my patients. It’s just another example of dollars wasted on something that has minimal impact on patient safety. In the last six years of reporting through AIMS, not one single meaningful piece of information has been communicated to me or my staff. What is the actual downstream impact to my patients and their safety?? I would encourage OCP to allow safety reporting to be completed in a way that is efficient and effective and suits the needs of each specific pharmacy – online or not. This is also just another example of downloading costs and to pharmacies. I think OCP needs to do some serious self reflection of their own spending to minimize their own costs.
OCP wants quarterly quality meetings to be standardized! I think the Owner/Designated Manager should know their business better than OCP! If I need a quality meeting I will call for one every week if I feel it is needed. OCP should stay out of trying to run my Pharmacy! What is next? Is OCP going to tell me what hours my store should be open? Enough with all these regulations!
This is TOO much for us. We are already burnt out and most us do have families outside of work that also need our time, please stop over working us, we already work LONG hours
I greatly appreciate and support the proposed changes on Assurance and Improvement in Medication Safety ( AIMS ) program changes. These changes will help greatly to grant medication safety and excellent quality practice in Ontario’s community pharmacies. The changes are easy to understand and align with the objectives of the AIMS program for better safety in medication and quality improvement. I don’t see any barriers for implementing the proposed changes.
I disagree with passing the costs of reporting platform to pharmacies. Pharmacies have not seen a dispensing fee increase in many years, along with increased licencing fees and college fees (which have grown with inflation) and with increasing competition against PPNs (which the college has yet to act on), many pharmacies will not be able to bear this additional cost. There is not a lot of competition in these platforms since all pharmacies were currently using the OCP mandated pharmapod. Once the costs to pharmacies are passed directly to the pharmacies we will be at risk of being gouged. This will further reduce the accessibility of pharmacies, who are financially stretched thin in terms of being able to pay for employees. The college should be covering the costs of these platforms simply because the college will be able to better negotiate the prices for these platforms. If the costs must be passed on, there should be mandates made to cap the costs of the platform to what the college was paying.
Identifying and preventing medication errors is a key component of pharmacy practice That being said, Pharmapod is a brutally bad piece of software to use, and has little to no relevance to the prevention of dispensing errors in day-to-day practice, which is of course why no one is using it Our pharmacy had an in-house solution that collected and stored incident information in our pharmacy practice software, but was deemed insufficient by OCP because the data was not shareable. The logical evolution of AIMS is to incorporate error and near-miss information into practice management software in real time as the incident is being identified with the ability to later submit the data to ISMP for analysis At pharmacy level, we will need more guidance than this document provides in order to replace Pharmapod Has OCP or NAPRA discussed this issue with pharmacy software vendors?